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Linkerd GSoC 2020

Ivan Sim

Ivan Sim
May 4, 2020 • 3 min read

We are excited to announce that Linkerd is participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program again this year as a mentor organization! We look forward to working with these awesome folks and providing the students with a summer of rewarding open source experience. We want to encourage them to be lifelong advocates and contributors of the open source community.

GSoC is an annual program organized by Google, where college and university students from around the world are paired with mentoring organizations to work on participating open source projects. Students get to spend their summer learning and writing code, while getting paid. Mentor organizations get valuable contributions and feedback to their projects, contribution workflow and mentorship program.

Last year, we had a very successful GSoC experience with Tarun Pothulapati, who made significant contributions to the Linkerd and Service Mesh Interface (SMI) projects. Tarun continued his involvement in the service mesh, SMI and tracing community after GSoC 2019 concluded. And upon completing his studies, he joined Buoyant as a full-time contributor to the Linkerd project.

This year, we are happy to announce that we have 2 GSoC students joining us. We will like to welcome Ali Ariff and Mayank Shah to the team:

GSoC 2020

Ali is a student from RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany. He is currently enrolled in the Master Programme Software Systems Engineering program. He will be spending the summer working on extending the Linkerd build pipeline to support ARM builds. There’s already been some awesome work in the community to make it happen, we’re so excited that it’ll become official now! Imagine being able to run Linkerd with k3s on your fleet of Raspberry Pi!

Mayank is from Chennai, India. He is currently enrolled in the B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering program in Vellore Institute of Technology. Mayank will help the community to build out a suite of conformance tests, which can be used to determine if your existing Kubernetes cluster setup (pod security policy, service accounts auto-mount configuration, API server extensions TLS setup etc.) will work with Linkerd. Every Kubernetes cluster is different and while check is awesome, it can’t check everything! The conformance test suite will help diagnose problems in how clusters are configured as well as hunt down bugs that crop up in Linkerd.

You can check out the RFCs for both projects here:

We are very excited to have Ali and Mayank on the Linkerd team. They will be joining us at this month’s Linkerd online community meetup, on May 27 at 9AM PST . Be sure to drop by to show them your support!

Linkerd is for everyone

Linkerd is a community project and is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Linkerd is committed to open governance. If you have feature requests, questions, or comments, we’d love to have you join our rapidly-growing community! Linkerd is hosted on GitHub, and we have a thriving community on Slack, Twitter, and the mailing lists. Come and join the fun!

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